Every good artist has to change his canvas. At some point

‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’

Socrates

‘What if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?’

Kurt Vonnegut

‘Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.’

Saul Bellow

I once quoted Socrates at the beginning of an angst-ridden, existentialist-funk themed post sometime in 2010. Relax – I’m not about to do the same.

But it has been a while.

February 2012 was my last post…I wonder if anyone had given me up for dead?

I’ve been putting this off for long enough, so I think I can be forgiven for asking myself ‘where do I begin?’

At the end of that post, I pontificated on what it meant that 2012 was set to become a busy year with that wretched Delta on tap – what was it going to mean for this blog? I didn’t expect to junk it altogether. Although time got the better of me, the real reason was more of extended ‘creative’ writer’s block, plus a lack of inspiration and motivation. The Delta required such a different style of writing – I really should put writing in quotation marks (‘writing’ - there!) – that it sapped all my creative juices and left me having to whittle my craft down to an adverb- and adjective-less, drab style that wouldn’t serve to entertain even the hardiest of my readers.

I’ll say no more about the Delta – trust me, it’s boring. (was and is, that is)

And I think I started to suffer from blogfade.

Also, the adventures started to dry up – if I haven’t got epic stories to share, then what else is there? As if we need more ruminations on current affairs and wry observations about everyday life. I seem to have fallen victim to the cruelties of quotidian life.

And if I’m a bit rusty – well, I’m changing things up here, so it may take time to find my old groove. I’ll have to ask for your patience on this one.

So…where to begin?

I’ve almost thrown in the towel and called it quits with this blog on more than one occasion, only to be cajoled back giving it another go. This time, the pleas from friends and faithful readers dried up long ago and no one, save for my students who discover it, really mention it anymore. Even erstwhile editor and literary inspiration the G-Man hasn’t talked of it recently. Then again, I am pretty out of touch with people these days. My writer’s block has even extended itself to emails.

‘It’s better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.’ (Cyril Connolly)

This quotation might best sum up how I was starting to feel. I felt as though I was writing for others and not myself. I felt pressure to perform, so to speak, much of it internal. I wasn’t sure who I was writing for and I wasn’t sure how much pleasure I was deriving from it. I felt an enormous sense of relief after posting, and then dread as the days went by and I sensed it was time to write another one.

When I started this blog, the original Layman’s Guide in February 2009, I had modest intentions: I meant it as a way to keep my friends informed, almost as a means to replace individual emails. I had little idea of what blogs were for or about – I was and always will be a Luddite (yes, yes, I blog, so what, who doesn’t? and yes, yes, this Luddite, technophobe angle is an old, boring and drawn-out one, I won’t rehash that again here). At times I started to painfully overwrite and agonise for hours (and days, even) about phrases and words and stories. I think I’d had enough of that.

My computer is also a piece of shit which causes me no end of stress. On some days it’s virtually unusable. (Side note: I think I’ve now owned and tried every major brand of computer. And you know what? They all suck. Every last one of them. I’m not sure what’s left to try – Lenovo? At the moment I’m plying my trade on an HP, which may be the worst of the lot.)

So now I’m back. The question is, why? What’s changed?

I need to rediscover my creative juices, I think. I want to keep people informed, perhaps. My mind is slowly deteriorating due to lack of intellectual stimulation and this will keep it fresh, I hope. Hell, I find myself struggling to write simple, basic emails. Some of them have not been up to my usual lofty standards, and that’s putting it mildly. I’ve noticed that I’ve been using ‘!’ in excess. That’s when you know you’re losing your touch!!!

(I could also mention a lack of time, but…come on! Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz…talk about boring – who the hell does have ample free time these days? That can’t be an excuse. Until you have a kid, maybe)

But most important of all, I have shit to say. Shit I want to say. Whether anyone wants to hear it or not, I want to say it. So, for now, I’m going to write for myself. I’ve got some whingeing to do, some complaining to do, nothing’s changed there. But I want to change the way I go about this. I want to write shit, unadulterated shit, no holds barred shit, without remorse and without worrying about offending anyone. (And no, I don’t intend to write the word shit ad infinitum.)

For my own sake, I have to change the way I go about things though.

This, one of my favourite posts, will serve as a good model for things to come:

My adventures in Tiraspol

Not the style, not the epic adventure, but the fact that I churned that baby out in record time with minimal editing and little reflection. I just wrote and wrote and that’s what came out of my head. I was on the road at the time, leaving little time for re-writing anyway, and I was under time constraints due to whatever unpleasant, squalid little internet café I had happened to chance upon.

I intend to do more of that, though in more bite-sized chunks. As I’ve said, I’ve got shit to say, and I intend to say it in shorter bursts, and more frequently.

We’ll see how long this lasts.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way.

But wait…there’s one more thing. One more major reason why this blog has suffered in silence for so long. It’s something much more mundane, and even a trifle shameful. But the passage of time has made your dear author physically unable to cope with today’s modern world. Middle age, and father time, has ravaged my back and made my right arm a limp, lifeless mess – typing is difficult, to say the least. My upper back, neck, arm are all a bit of a mess. This all started…right after I started the Delta. I shall say no more.

(though in fairness, the back problems have been ongoing for years; they’ve only really escalated in the past 12+ months. That’s another reason why I hardly email these days, I just haven’t got the physical energy, never mind the mental.)

The G-Man recently brought these titles to my attention:

Teach Us to Sit Still: A Sceptic's Search for Health and Healing by Tim Parks

The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves by Siri Hustvedt

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Calahan

He – and I hope he doesn’t mind that I’m quoting him – puts these into the genre of ‘undefined medical conditions suffered by writers who then turn the ailment into a memoir’.

No, I intend nothing of the sort. But I will do my fair share of moaning. My Month of Madness? A whole lifetime is more like it.

I’ll admit it, not so long ago I was in a bit of a rut or a funk, I’m not sure which is more apt. My brain was dead, I was lethargic, I wasn’t sufficiently inspired to do much of anything (were it not for my dear girlfriend, I would have been a total mess). The long, cold, epic winter might have had something to do with it, but I’ve never been one to wallow in the depths of winter gloom. I’ve always found something to appreciate in winter. But not this year – I’m glad for spring’s arrival. I can honestly say, for the first time in my life, I needed this badly.

But stuck where I was, not only hornswoggled but mellowing in misery and stressing myself out to no end – it was that most dangerous type of stress of all, the self-inflicted variety that my friend Mark always warns me against – I needed some sort of consolation. And it was to Alain de Botton I turned.

The Consolations of Philosophy

This sounds cheesy, I know. De Botton has his fair share of critics – I’m one of them. I think he’s produced some stellar pieces of work: The Pleasures and Sorrows of the Workplace is perhaps my favourite. He’s also written some turgid clunkers. I happen to thoroughly enjoy the Consolations of Philosophy, but let’s not kid ourselves here: this is philosophy-lite. It’s as lite as it gets, bedtime reading, mentally untaxing, far from challenging intellectually. It’s a mere primer for the real thing. After reading this for the first time a few years ago, I was inspired enough to track down the real thing: Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche (though I read him a lot at university) and Seneca.  

But it’s cathartic. And it helped the second time around. And besides, as much complaining as I – as we all – do, it doesn’t do a damn bit of good unless you do something about it. As a newfound man of action, I turn and look for the positives. Without forgetting the natural positivity to be found in negativity and pessimism – after all, complaining is fun. Positivity, and actively striving for happiness, can be dangerous and damaging. (see Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman)

As has been my wont on these very pages, I’ll quote a few passages.

‘Just as medicine confers no benefit if it does not drive away physical illness, so philosophy is useless if it does not drive away the suffering of the mind’. (Epicurus)

We look for doctors when we’re not right in the body. It’s to philosophers we turn when we’re not right in the head.

De Botton enlists Montaigne as his guide to his chapter on the consolations of inadequacy, of the sexual, cultural and intellectual variety. My inadequacy these days is of the purely physical – arm, back and neck – type.

In times where I want to escape, I usually turn to reading, as did Montaigne:

‘It consoles me in my retreat; it relieves me of the weight of distressing idleness and, at any time, can rid me of boring company. It blunts the stabs of pain whenever pain is not too overpowering and extreme. To distract me from morose thoughts, I simply need to have recourse to books.’

But in 2013 I haven’t even read as much as I used to. I am devoting a bit more time to Russian, lots more time to the gym, plenty more time to my financial stock market shenanigans. But my reading has definitely suffered.*

‘Many things that I would not care to tell any individual man I tell to the public, and for knowledge of my most secret thoughts, I refer my most loyal friends to a bookseller’s stall.’

My blog has always had this element. I sometimes go through long periods of teaching and not socializing much. I probably take this out on my students: when I have things I’ve read about or are just generally on my mind, I spew forth and offer up my unbridled opinions while they sometimes just look at me with a ‘what-the-hell-are-you-on-about?’ look on their faces. I’ll attempt to put down more of my inner ramblings here to save others the torture of hearing my verbal diarrhea in inappropriate forums.

For more on Montaigne, in a lite, accessible format, I can recommend How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer (Sarah Bakewell).

‘If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life.’

Here is de Botton in a nutshell. Talk about stating the obvious, yes. But…

‘It is tempting to quote authors when they express our very own thoughts but with a clarity and psychological accuracy we cannot match. They know us better than we know ourselves. What is shy and confused in us is succinctly and elegantly phrased in them, our pencil lines and annotations in the margins of their books and our borrowings from them indicating where we find a piece of ourselves, a sentence or two built of the very substance of which our own minds are made – a congruence all the more striking if the work was written in an age of togas and animal sacrifices. We invite these words into our books as a homage for reminding us of who we are.’

…it speaks to us, or me anyway. Why bother paraphrasing or even commenting when it’s been said before, in a way that effectively captures your thoughts. If you can’t improve upon the original, then don’t. Quotations often suffice; further commentary is, more often than not, superfluous. Especially when it’s me waffling on.

The challenges of quotidian life: love, sex, illness, death, children, money and ambition.

As for death here are two of Montaigne’s aphorisms:

‘I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.’

‘I can scarcely tell my cabbages from my lettuces’.

What is a wise approach to death?

‘If only talking to oneself did not look mad, no day would go by without my being heard growling to myself, against myself, ‘You silly shit!’’

‘The most uncouth of our afflictions is to despise our being.’

How much love should we have for ourselves?

Schopenhauer’s take on happiness. We’ve heard from him before – my rambling post on relationships relied heavily on this doom and gloom merchant:

‘There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy…So long as we persist in this inborn error…the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in great things and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence…hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of what is called disappointment’.

And Seneca, in brief:

‘What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.’

The la[z]yman’s guide to Nietzsche and happiness:

At this point I’ve run out of steam and can’t be bothered to bore myself or others any longer, though I had intended to gush forth with a few words here. In a nutshell: life sucks at times, it’s frustrating, accept it, but then it may or may not get better, but there’s no avoiding the crap, so grin and bear it, put up with it, deal with it, etc, etc.

That’ll do.

A brief 2012 recap: (besides a year of Delta-induced torture)

* Spain for 2 weeks in August. It was fun. I continue to maintain Barcelona is vastly overrated. I may or may not write about this at some point.

Good, that covers that.

In the pipeline for the upcoming months:

* My long list of pet hates, partially by popular demand – students keep asking for this so I’ll have to get round to it.

* A few students recently asked me: ‘what do students do that irritate you?’ I thought ‘where do I begin?!’ So I’m compiling a list and will share that once I’ve got a good one.

* Parts IV and V of my 2011 summer travel shenanigans – I last left off with Dr Wasabi Islam in Budapest.

* My thoughts on what the ‘Ukrainian mentality’ entails.

* The occasional story from the past.

* Little things that pop into my mind.

* More philosophy. (I’m joking)

 If you’ve made it this far, you need to get out more. Enjoy the spring sunshine.

Thanks for reading – I’ll try and do better the next time. Let’s aim for shorter and snappier.

*My brief 2013 reading list: The Investor’s Manifesto: Preparing for Prosperity (Bernstein); A Random Walk Down Wall Street (Malkiel); The Siege of Krishnapur (Farrell); Darkmarket: How Hackers Became (sic) the New Mafia (Glenny); in progress: Midnight’s Children (Rushdie); Your Money and Your Brain: How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich (Zweig); Arguably (Christopher Hitchens)

Brief, indeed – that’s the lot!